Silvia Pettini

Università degli Studi Roma Tre

Languaging and Translating Personality in Video Games:

A Lexical Approach to The Sims 4 Psychological Simulation
Abstract
From the perspective of Game Localization (Bernal-Merino 2015, O’Hagan and Mangiron
2013), this paper presents a descriptive corpus-assisted study on the language of
personality in The Sims 4 (Electronic Arts 2014), as the psychological dimension of this
real-life simulation game represents its distinctive feature (Franklin 2014, Electronic Arts
2014a). The elaborate nature of The Sims 4 personality trait system has received academic
attention, since its mechanics seem to be based on trait theory (Sloan 2015, 20y), “a major
approach to the study [and assessment] of human personality” in psychology (Villanueva
2010, vii). Accordingly, this paper analyzes how psychological simulation is worded in
game texts and examines the features of The Sims 4 cross-linguistic personality lexicon. The
original English trait system is thus compared with the Italian translation in order to
explore the linguistic challenges and issues psychological customization poses to
localization professionals.

1. Introduction

With many people globally at home and unable to work due to the Covid-1y
pandemic, gaming, particularly online gaming, has recorded a massive increase
in engagement and revenues during lockdown, as video games have become
an invaluable way to safely connect while staying apart (Romano 2020).
In order to encourage people to entertain themselves while practicing
physical distancing, as Snider (2020) reports, many game companies
launched an initiative titled #PlayApartTogether, which was even praised
and supported by the World Health Organization.
As psychology professor at Stetson University Chris Ferguson explains
(cit. in Stieg 2020), there are psychological reasons, besides the entertainment

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Languaging and Translating Personality in Video Games, SQ 20

factor, why people have drawn their interest to video games in the pandemic:
given the difficulty in meeting certain needs in real life, people turn to virtual
worlds, and life simulation games like The Sims series (Electronic Arts
2000
- Present) prove to be extremely therapeutic. According to Ferguson (Ibid.),
these games help people to feel in control over their decisions and goals, they
keep people social, since not only players can communicate with other
fictional characters within the game world, but they can also connect to other
players online. Thus, these simulation games represent a form of escapism,
based on the very ordinary lives people can play in the fictional world, which
offer them a sense of normality in a real world turned upside down (Ibid.).
As argued by Jane McGonigal (cit. in Owens 2020, online), director of
game research and development at the Institute for the Future, “gaming is an
incredible act of self-care” because games give players “a sense of agency at a
time when most people don’t have any”, they represent “a safe space”
because “for many people now, the fantasy is just ordinary life”.
Consequently, it comes as no surprise to learn that the latest episode
of the franchise, The Sims 4 (Electronic Arts, 2014) “has had its biggest year
since launch in terms of revenue and engagement,” according to the game’s
publisher (cit. in Wilson 2020, online). Moreover, as Wilson relates (Ibid.),
some players in The Sims YouTube community have started to share gameplay
videos reflecting the new reality of the pandemic: they have roleplayed out
the pandemic, with Sims following the medical advice of health authorities
around the world, being socially distant, wearing masks and undergoing
quarantine. After all, comedy and laughter are a great form of stress relief,
and that is no joke.
The increase in player engagement recorded by The Sims 4, which testifies
to the cultural relevance of life simulation in the present day, is not the only
achievement to be celebrated in the year of the pandemic. Indeed, 2020 also
represents the 20th anniversary of The Sims franchise.1 More relevantly for
the purposes of this paper, these games have been distributed in dozens of
countries worldwide and translated into just as many languages.2 The process

1 Since its launch in 2000, this franchise has sold around 200 million copies globally, gen-
erated more than 5 billion US dollars in revenue, and a total population of over 1.5 billion
Sims has been created (see Bhavani 2020, Roberts 2020). As regards The Sims 4, this episode
alone has recorded more than US$1 billion in revenue and has recently passed 20 million
players around the world (Ibid.).
2 The Sims 4, for example, is available in 18 different languages.

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of game localization, of which translation is a fundamental phase (see
Maxwell- Chandler and O’Malley-Deming 2012), has played a major role in
the cultural and commercial success of The Sims series at global level.
Based on these premises, this paper aims to present the first results of a
research project on the localization challenges of life simulation from the
perspective of Game Localization.3 However, given the complexity of this
franchise, this paper is based on a descriptive corpus-assisted study which
focuses on some of the linguistic and translational aspects of The Sims 4
personality customization, because the psychological dimension of
simulation represents the special characteristic of this episode (Franklin
2014, Electronic Arts 2014a).
Section 2 presents The Sims 4, with special attention to its complex
personality customization system. Section 3 contains background information
regarding the psycholexical approach in personality psychology (Ashton
2018, 124-125), which represents a relevant developmental perspective into
the language of personality.4
Section 4 describes how the personality trait system is worded in game
texts and explores the linguistic features of The Sims 4 personality lexicon
in the English source language. Section 5 examines the transfer of personality
trait names from English into Italian, offers an overview of the lexical
phenomena and challenges they present, and discusses some semantic
features of the solutions provided by Italian localization professionals.
Finally, some conclusions are drawn in Section 5, while offering potential
avenues for further research.

3 In Game Localization scientific literature, little attention has been paid to this franchise.
To my knowledge, except for some references in handbooks (Bernal-Merino 2015, O’Hagan
and Mangiron 2013) and papers (Fernández-Costales 2011) and a few unpublished theses
at university level (Davidson 2011, Dodaro 2014, Eerio 2014), no studies on The Sims have
been published so far.
4 In this regard, it is worth underlining that this paper does not aim to examine the veri-
similitude of personality psychology in the game mechanics or of personality traits in The
Sims 4 system. For these purposes, collaboration with psychology experts is necessary, but
beyond the scope of this pilot research. Nevertheless, as will emerge in Sections 4 and 5,
giv- en the possibility of making parallels between the ‘lexical approach’ used in
psychology and the lexical approach adopted as a working methodology in this paper,
Section 3 aims to pro- vide the reader with a general summary of the context in which trait
theory has developed, which draws on the most relevant works on the topic. Indeed, the
emphasis placed by psy- chologists on natural languages and dictionaries in developing
personality traits prompted the researcher to analyze data from a lexical and
metalexicographic perspective.

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Languaging and Translating Personality in Video Games, SQ 20

2. The Sims 4 personality system

The Sims series, originally created by designer and auteur Will Wright, is
an extremely popular game franchise which, over its four main titles and
numerous expansions and spin-offs, has become a cultural phenomenon by
simply replacing monsters with plain humans and proving that ‘real’ life can
be simulated by interactive entertainment (Chan 2003, Frasca 2001, Sihvonen
2011). In this sense, The Sims is considered as “a landmark in videogame
history” (Frasca 2001, online), since it has “proven that the mainstream game
market could enthusiastically embrace a game based on the simulation of
emotions and people over guns and fighting” (Chan 2003, 1). In other
words, millions of players worldwide have fun by creating and managing the
everyday lives of simulated people known as Sims and, given the series’
open-endedness, the gaming experiences players co-author may be uniquely
personal.
The Sims 4 is the fourth major title in The Sims series. It was published
by Electronic Arts (EA hereafter) in 2014 and developed by Maxis
together with EA in-house The Sims Studio as a multiplatform title.5 The game
has the same fun factor as its predecessors: players create and interact with a
series of characters in order to simulate everyday life experiences (Bittanti and
Flanagan 2003). Indeed, as Nutt and Railton (2003) remark, this franchise has
established real life as a game genre, in the sense that players understand and
enjoy the game through their notion of real life, and on this basis they can use
the game as a sort of life laboratory to play “with ‘like real life’ narratives” in
either realistic or very creative ways (Ibid., 58y). In the words of writer Liv
Siddall (201y, online), The Sims games’ “appeal lies in its close-to-real-life-ness.
You pay bills. You load the dishwasher. You make beds. You clean stuff”. The
healthier and happier the Sims become, the more enjoyable the game, but
players “cannot ‘win’ – there is no credit roll. Your Sims might reach the top
of their career ladders, retire with a healthy pension, and die, but the game
goes on” (Ibid.).
As already mentioned, the added value of this fourth episode is the
psychological dimension of life simulation. As the game’s executive producer
Rachel Franklin (2014) explains, while in previous games you controlled the

5 The Sims 4 was initially released for PC and Mac, later including versions for consoles.
Since its launch, dozens of expansions and additional downloadable content have been re-
leased, but this paper focuses on the base game for PC.

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mind and body of your Sims, in The Sims 4, for the first time, you “control
their hearts”, you decide “who they are. You define your Sim personality”
and “this is when the power of our simulation comes into play: personality
drives behavior, creating richer stories and the possibilities when you play
with life are simply endless”. This is also the main theme of The Sims 4
player’s guide (Electronic Arts 2014a, 1, emphasis in the original):

The Sims 4 is all about the big personalities and individuality of every Sim […]. Who they
are and how they behave changes the way you play, and changes the lives of your Sims […].
In The Sims 4, it’s not just about WHAT your Sims look like, it’s about WHO they are on
the inside that really counts. And all of it is in your hands.

Moreover, Electronic Arts (2014b) offers players the possibility of taking a

personality diagnostic to discover which personality matches them best in
The Sims 4.
In-game, this dimension of personality customization is translated into
new options within the ‘Create a Sim’ mechanic: players co-design their
Sims by choosing a number of attributes, such as name, gender, age, physical
appearance and clothes, voice, walkstyles, etc., and, as regards personality,
one aspiration and three traits.
Aspirations are lifelong goals for the Sims and there are ten broad
aspiration tracks, namely Athletic, Creativity, Deviance, Family, Food,
Fortune, Knowledge, Love, Nature, and Popularity, each branching into
further categories. For example, by selecting Creativity as his/her aspiration,
the player may be a ‘painter extraordinaire’, a ‘musical genius’ or a
‘bestselling author’. More importantly, personality traits give Sims unique
interactions and preferences throughout their life because they define their
actions, desires, whims, and emotions. They represent a personality system
including 101 traits which, in the mechanics of the game, are divided into
three types: customizable traits proper (3y), bonus traits (10), and reward
traits (52), whose difference lies in the way they can be acquired.
Customizable traits are the traits players can choose from when creating
their avatars in order to define what their Sims do or do not enjoy doing, like
‘foodie’, ‘lazy’ and ‘geek’, or how they interact with each other, thus
influencing the way they create and maintain social interactions and
relationships, like ‘bro’, ‘evil’, and ‘loner’.

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Languaging and Translating Personality in Video Games, SQ 20

Bonus traits are associated with aspirations, meaning that players are
assigned bonus traits to fulfil aspiration goals more easily. For example, if the
player selects ‘bodybuilder’ as his/her Athletic aspiration, s/he will acquire
‘high metabolism’ as a bonus trait.
Lastly, reward traits can be either acquired by completing aspirations or
purchased with satisfaction points. The latter can be earned by either fulfilling
whims or achieving aspirations’ single milestones. Examples of reward traits
include ‘long-lived’ or ‘gym rat’ for the Athletic aspiration, ‘speed reader’ for
Knowledge, ‘great kisser’ for Love, and ‘super green thumb’ for Nature, among
many others.
The complex nature of The Sims 4 personality system has attracted
academic attention. As Game Art and Design scholar Robin Sloan (2015, 20y)
explains, although “the simulation of human personalities is arguably the
most interesting quality of the characters” in the whole series, in the sense that
all games “have an explicit focus on character behaviors and personalities”
(Ibid., 208), The Sims 4 “introduced the most advanced set of behavioral
variables to date” which allow players to design “a complex personality for
their characters” (Ibid., 20y).
According to Sloan (Ibid.), “we can recognize personality theories” in the
customization system of The Sims 4, which seems to be informed on those
psychological principles of personality which make game characters more
realistic and believable, so that players can relate to, empathize and identify
with them more easily (Ibid., 81). Sloan refers to personality psychology
and trait theory, a very large area within the science of psychology, aimed at
investigating such a complex psychological entity like personality on the basis
of traits. The latter are “consistent patterns of thoughts, feelings, or actions”
which, “by definition, describe how we differ from one another, and the sum
of these differences define our uniqueness” (Johnson 1yy7, 87, emphasis in
the original). In other words, traits “can be defined as habitual patterns of
behavior, thought, and emotion”, which “are relatively stable over time, differ
among individuals, and influence behavior” (Villanueva 2010, vii).

3.The psycholexical approach to personality

According to Matthews et al. (200y, 3) “the idea of personality traits may be as

old as human language itself” and “the language of personality description
permeates our everyday conversation and discourse”, which explains why
“contemporary

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English is replete with terms used to describe personal qualities”. As Goldie
(2004, 1-2) puts it, “we call people kindhearted, generous, fair-minded, witty,
flaky, charming, mean-spirited, […]. Aspects of personality such as these,”
also known as traits, “are constantly being appealed to in our everyday
descriptions of ourselves and of others”. “Personality discourse is everywhere”,
that is wherever people think, talk, and write about themselves or other people
(Ibid., 1).
In the field of psychology, “trait theory is a major approach to the study
[and assessment] of human personality” (Villanueva 2010, vii). For these
purposes, as Ashton (2018, 111-148) explains, psychologists used a
methodology which has presumably been a source of inspiration for The
Sims 4 game designers and which serves as the background for the analysis
presented in Section 5. Indeed, in order to classify traits, psychologists
adopted the so-called “lexical approach” (Ashton 2018, 124-125): they
compiled full lists of personality- descriptive attributes that can be found in
the dictionaries of a language and created “a language’s personality lexicon”.
“The psycholexical approach is typically associated historically with Allport
and Odbert (1y35), Cattell (1y43), and Goldberg (1y81). Characteristic of that
approach is the systematic use of tangible repositories of the lexicon of a
language”, most often dictionaries, “in order to arrive at full and
comprehensive tabulations of all lingual expressions that can be used to
describe personality” (De Raad and Mlačić 2017, 152).
As regards the linguistic nature of traits, as Saucier and Goldberg (1yy5,
30) seminally explained, personality description in language translates into
adjectival concepts and works “primarily through the adjective function”,
which “in some languages, […] is carried out entirely through adjectives,
whereas in others, the function may be carried out mostly through nouns or
verbs”. In particular, “English, like other Indo-European languages, appears
to fall between these extremes; it has a very large adjective class, but the
adjective function is sometimes carried out through nouns or verbs” (Ibid.).
The foundation or rationale of this approach is the “lexical hypothesis”
(Goldberg 1y81), in turn based on two assumptions: first, all attributes worth
selecting for psychologists are encoded in everyday words, representing the
wisdom of natural languages;G second, the degree of crosslinguistic lexical rep-

5 Indeed, the “plausibility” of the lexical hypothesis (Allport and Odbert 1y35) implies
that traits or individual differences found important by people must be or will be
represented in language and, thus, will be recorded in dictionaries.

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Languaging and Translating Personality in Video Games, SQ 20

resentation of an attribute indicates its importance. “Thus, the most import-

ant personality attributes should have a corresponding term in virtually every
language” (Saucier and Goldberg 1yy5, 25) because, as De Raad and Mlačić
argue (2017, 152), “individual differences observed in a culture are studied
bottom-up by exploiting the lexicon of the language of that culture and by
organizing the culture-specific language of personality in a comprehensive
way”. Since its development, “the psycholexical approach has been applied
in many languages, each […] resulting in a trait structure that is assumed to
capture the most important trait dimensions of that language” (De Raad
and Mlačić 2017, 153). These dimensions took the shape of the “Five-Factor
Model of Personality”, also known as the “Big Five”, formulated by Costa
and McCrae (1yy2) and based on five factors (Extraversion, Agreeableness,
Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Intellect or Openness to Expe-
rience),7 which are “hypothesized to cover the most important semantics of
individual differences across languages” (De Raad and Mlačić 2017, 153).
A more in-depth discussion about this reference model of personality
assessment, and of its development due to the intense debate surrounding
it (see Widiger 2017), is beyond the scope of this paper, whose objective is to
explore the linguistic and translational challenges of personality
customization in The Sims 4 and not to evaluate whether and how the
game’s personality traits correspond to real personality traits. However, in
this regard, it is worth specifying that the notion of a crosscultural or
universal nature of personality characteristics and descriptors heavily relied
on the practice of translation, aimed at replicating the English Big Five model,
and subsequent versions, in each and every language and culture of the
world.8

4. Languaging personality traits

The psychological dimension of simulation in The Sims 4 English original texts

is worded in a contemporary and playful set of personality lexicon. In the game’s

7 An introduction to the Big Five constructs is provided by De Raad and Perugini (2002).
8 Church (2017) has edited a comprehensive three-volume work concerning the language
of personality across cultures. As regards the use of the psycholexical approach in the
Italian language, see Caprara and Perugini (1yy1, 1yy4), Di Blas and Perugini (2002),
Ubbiali et al. (2013), among others.

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glossary,9 it means 101 trait names which, from the linguistic point of view, in
line with the lexical approach used in psychology, are encoded into a variety of
single and multi-word expressions with an attributive and descriptive
function.
As regards this point, although word class assignment is quite difficult out
of co- text and context, and although the phenomenon of conversion or zero
derivation allows words to serve different word classes in English, on the basis of
dictionary definitions (Oxford Dictionary of English, online), as Figure 4.1
illustrates, traits are mostly adjectives (54%) and nouns (44%), in turn
subdivided into simple or derived adjectives (42%) and compound adjectives
(12%), i.e. an adjective plus a noun or an adverb, and simple or derived nouns
(12%), compound nouns (15%) and agent nouns (15%), but there are also two
instances of descriptive subjectless clauses (2%) in the source text, namely ‘hates
children’ and ‘loves outdoors’.

Figure 4.1 Word classes of The Sims 4 English personality traits

For example, adjectives include trait names worded in either simple and derived
forms like ‘active’, ‘dastardly’, ‘independent’ and ‘noncommittal’, and
compound attributes like ‘family-oriented’, ‘hardly hungry’ and ‘never weary’.
Examples of

y The glossary of a video game or of a game franchise is an official terminology database

which contains the body of terms belonging to the game world in different languages.
Com- piled and updated by localization professionals, it represents an invaluable reference
materi- al for translators for the purposes of terminological consistency (see Pettini 2015).

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Languaging and Translating Personality in Video Games, SQ 20

nouns used to name personality traits comprise simple and derived forms like
‘companion’, ‘foodie’ and ‘genius’, compound nouns like ‘bookworm’
and ‘mastermind’, and also agent nouns like ‘appraiser’ or ‘tormentor’,
sometimes in combination with other adjectives or nouns, as in ‘great kisser’
and ‘music lover’. In Italian,
wordclassassignmentisequallycomplexbecausemanytraitnames can be
interpreted as both adjective and noun out of context. Nevertheless,
according to Treccani dictionary definitions (Vocabolario Treccani, online),
even if word classes proportions are quite similar to the English ones,
with adjectives and nouns representing 51% and 47% of the instances
respectively, this does not mean that they necessarily correspond to the same
word classes of the source language, because adjectives and nouns are not
always translated into equivalent adjectives and nouns. On the contrary, there
are 11 instances of nouns in Italian which are adjectives in English, and this
mostly depends on the strategy used in translation to deal with compound
adjectives, as will be illustrated in Section 5.2. As regards the two instances
of subjectless clauses, they are kept unaltered in Italian and translated into
calqued subjectless clauses: odia i bambini for ‘hates children’ and ama l’aria
aperta for ‘loves outdoors’.

5.Translating personality traits

The Sims 4 personality trait system presents translators with different

challenges to deal with, some of which are specific to game localization,
in the sense that they depend on the particular characteristics of this
translation realm, while other phenomena depend on the lexical nature of the
items in the source language. In detail, gender issues, space constraints and
the lack of co- text and context, which clearly exemplify the specificities of
game translation, combine with other potential difficulties due to formal and
semantic features typical of the English vocabulary expressing adjectival
concepts and languaging personality traits.

5.1 Game localization challenges

Given the gender-customizable nature of The Sims 4, which allows players to

choose their avatar’s gender, and given the types of word classes used to
name

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traits, mainly adjectives and nouns, the transfer from English into Italian, that
is to say translating from a language with a mainly semantic gender system into
a Romance language with both a semantic and a grammatical gender system,
requires translators to use the so-called “variables” (see Bernal-Merino 2015,
147-152, Díaz-Montón 2007, Heimburg 2005, O’Hagan and Mangiron
2013, 132-133; Pettini 2018). Variables belong to programming metalanguage
and include a “set of codes and characters that mark gender-variable strings
with tags, generally ‘M’ for male and ‘F’ for female in brackets, serving as
computing instructions that allow the game engine to display gender-
specific strings correctly” (Pettini 2020, 445), that is according to the
gender selected by the player for his/her avatar.
For example, in (1) the reward trait associated to Popularity aspiration
‘perfect host’ becomes either perfetto padrone di casa, if male, or perfetta
padrona di casa, if female, in Italian, because both the noun and the adjective
must agree with one another and with the gender of the player’s avatar. As the
string below shows, the gender variable part is the one contained within braces
and following the variable M or F plus 0, which indicates Sim 0, the one
controlled by the player.

(1) Perfect host {M0.Perfetto padrone}{F0.Perfetta padrona} di casa

Even if potentially all traits may be translated into gender-variable

equivalents, not all the strings are gender-marked because there may be
gender-neutral alternatives, i.e. one single and invariable form for both male
and female, such as collezionista for ‘collector’, infantile for ‘childish’, snob for
‘snob’. However, a more in-depth analysis of trait names shows that,
unfortunately, gender-biased solutions can be observed in terms of male-
specificity only, such as benvenuto perenne for ‘always welcome’ and sim
mattiniero for ‘morning sim’, where benvenuto and mattiniero might be
female-specific as well, by simply changing the word ending letter from ‘o’
into ‘a’. Also the reasons behind the choice of some neutral solutions and
therefore the lack of gender-variable tags are not immediately clear, as will
emerge in Section 5.2.1.
Since traits belong to the category of in-game or on-screen text and, in
particular, they appear in the user interface as isolated and decontextualized
linguistic items, they are potentially subject to space limitations. However, as
linguistic tester Dodaro (2013, 112) explains, “The Sims 4 makes large use of
tooltips and other flexible windows to show text on screen” and, in more detail,
as opposed

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 Languaging and Translating Personality in Video Games, SQ 20

to what one might expect, the number of characters allowed per string, which
varies depending on the trait type, ranging from twenty for traits proper to
thirty for reward traits, proves to be large enough to not constrain translators’
decisions. The lack of co-text and context, which is characteristic to
game localization, represents another challenge for The Sims 4 translators.
Except for in-game descriptions to be retrieved in the game database and
some pieces of information to be inferred by reading the identifier column
of both the glossary and the game database spreadsheets,10 when translating
personality traits, professionals are presented with a mere list of adjectival
expressions to be rendered into equivalent personality traits. In this respect,
an interesting example is that of ‘player’, a very common English word
whose polysemy might make its translation challenging with little or no
co-text and context. In detail, ‘player’ is a reward trait from completing
the Love aspiration category named ‘serial romantic’. In-game, this trait
is defined as follows: “Players will never cause other Sims to get jealous, no
matter what they do”. In English, the only meaning relatable to this
description is that of ‘player’ as a US English-specific informal or slang
noun referring to “a confident, successful man with many sexual
partners” (Oxford Dictionary of English, online) or “a person and
especially a man who has many lovers” (Merriam Webster Dictionary of
English, online). In this light, two linguistic features emerge: the very
informal nature in terms of register and its semantic male- specificity in
terms of referent. Equivalent expressions exist in Italian and all revolve
around the meaning of player as lady-killer, philanderer, womanizer, skirt-
chaser, among others, each presenting different register and semantic
nuances. However, it is possible to speculate that in order to comply with the
gender-customizable nature of The Sims 4 and, especially, with its age-rating,11

10 In game localization, language professionals work on Excel spreadsheets which

organize texts in typical table style format, with several columns (usually one per
language) and hun- dreds of thousands of rows or strings. The latter are assigned tags
which allow developers to identify strings and integrate translated ones into the game
engine files, thus avoiding dangerous cutting and pasting (Maxwell-Chandler and
O’Malley-Deming 2012, 200).
11According to PEGI (Pan European Game Information) age rating system, The Sims 4 is
labelled ‘12’. Age ratings can vary according to the target locale and are particularly relevant
for translation because they outline the prospective target audience, and consequently in-
fluence translators’ overall approach or single strategies, especially as regards bad
language (see Bernal-Merino 2015, 182-187).

41
translators appropriately provided a gender-variable and neutral solution like
seduttore, if male, and seduttrice, if female [seducer], thus deviating from the
original colloquial and androcentric value.

5.2 Language-specific

challenges As previously mentioned, translating The Sims 4 trait system also

means dealing
with challenges which are not specific to game localization. Though they are
inevitably connected with the constraints discussed so far, they depend on the
nature of the original items in terms of the formal, functional, and semantic
features that are typical of The Sims 4 English personality lexicon. Indeed, by
focusing on the characteristics of the source text, trait names represent
various lexical phenomena with different types and degrees of linguistic
complexity and interlinguistic difficulty, which can be broadly grouped into
the following working definitions: (a) conciseness and semantic density, (b)
cognate words,
(c) figurative and idiomatic language, (d) informal language and slang,
illustrated in Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1 Linguistic categories of The Sims 4 English personality lexicon

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Languaging and Translating Personality in Video Games, SQ 20

5.2.1 Conciseness and semantic density

This working lexical category (42%) refers to the general shortness of English
words, when compared to Romance languages like Italian, and the natural
ability of English to create meaning-packed constructions or to express a
complex meaning with one single word. The difficulty may be also connected
to length and to differences in language use as regards some constructions. In
linguistic terms, this group includes derived adjectives (15 instances),
compound adjectives (12 instances), agent nouns (11 instances) and a few
compound nouns (4 instances).
Derived adjectives, which are formed from other word classes by the
addition of affixes, are mostly directly translated into one-word or derived
equivalent adjectives, like folle for ‘insane’, parsimonioso or parsimoniosa for
‘thrifty’. However, in some cases the semantic value of the original adjective,
especially when deriving from a verb, is toned-down. For example, ‘alluring’
is a bonus trait awarded to a Sim for choosing one Love aspiration because, as
described in-game, “alluring Sims are more successful at romance than
others”, so being alluring help players to achieve their aspiration more easily.
In English ‘alluring’ means “powerfully and mysteriously attractive or
fascinating; seductive” (Oxford Dictionary of English, online) and in Italian it
is translated into the semantically superordinate attraente [attractive]. Other
translations in the group of derived adjectives include senza preoccupazioni
[without worries] for ‘carefree’ and senza vergogna [without shame] for
‘shameless’, both longer prepositional phrases which might have been
rendered into gender- variable adjectives like spensierato/a for ‘carefree’ and
spudorato/a, sfacciato/a, svergognato/a, sfrontato/a for ‘shameless’.
Compound adjectives (12 instances) are another group of concise and
semantically dense trait names. In the Italian translation, they tend to be
either paraphrased into nouns or directly translated into simple or derived
adjectives. Paraphrase and nominalization include, for example, amante
della famiglia [family lover] for ‘family-oriented’, doti sociali [social gifts]
for ‘socially- gifted’ and sapienza affaristica [business wisdom] for ‘business-
savvy’. Direct translation is used to render ‘long-lived’ into the gender-
variable longevo/a, and ‘never weary’ into instancabile [indefatigable]. This
category also comprises two instances of calque: the gender-variable poco
famelico/a for ‘hardly hungry’ and the masculine-generic benvenuto perenne
for ‘always welcome’, although

4
the selection of adjectives belonging to a more formal register, namely famelico
[ravenous] instead of affamato [hungry] and perenne [perennial] instead of
the adverb sempre [always] has a playful effect. Moreover, the witty nature of
benvenuto perenne also depends on the violation of selectional restrictions,
since perenne does not collocate with benvenuto in Italian.
Conciseness also relates to agent nouns (11 instances) which may be
difficult in translation because in Italian they don’t sound natural, since they
are rarely, if ever, used. This seems to be the reason why most agent nouns
are paraphrased, as in abile a baciare [good at kissing] for ‘great kisser’,
veloce a imparare [quick at learning] for ‘quick learner’, and riflessivo/a
[reflective] for ‘muser’. Indeed, the equivalent agent nouns in Italian,
namely baciatore for ‘kisser’, or meditatore for ‘muser’ are labelled “rare” in
their dictionary entries (Vocabolario Treccani, online). However, some agent
nouns are calqued into more common but still unusual solutions like
pulitore or pulitrice veloce for ‘speed cleaner’, tormentatore or tormentatrice for
‘tormentor’, which replicate the derivational pattern by adding the suffixes -
tore, if male, and -trice, if female.

5.2.2 Cognate words

The lexical category of cognate words (25%) includes traits which are mostly
translated into very straightforward solutions due to the phenomenon of
cross- linguistic lexical similarity,
meaningthepresenceofcognatewordsacrossthetwo languages (Pierini 2012,
211-214). This is the case of ambizioso/a for ‘ambitious’, indipendente for
‘independent’, romantico/a for ‘romantic’ and many other traits, like
‘active’, ‘creative’, ‘materialistic’, ‘poetic’, ‘sincere’, among others, which,
thanks to the common Latin origin, allow professionals to simply use the
formally and semantically similar word in their target language.
However, in the relationship between English and Italian, this category
also includes a few instances of false or deceptive cognates which are all
properly interpreted by translators. For example, ‘gregarious’ means “(of a
person) fond of company; sociable” (Oxford Dictionary of English, online)
and is correctly rendered into socievole and not into gregario which in Italian
refers to a private soldier or a subordinate and, by extension, a submissive
person (Vocabolario Treccani, online). Another example is ‘observant’, whose
meaning is both (1) “quick to notice or perceive things” and (2) “adhering
strictly to the rules of

4
Languaging and Translating Personality in Video Games, SQ 20

a particular religion” (Oxford Dictionary of English, online), and is correctly

translated into sguardo acuto [sharp-eyed] meaning (1) and not osservante
meaning (2) in Italian. Nevertheless, it must be specified that cognate words
may present different degrees of lexical similarity and some asymmetries
may emerge with respect to language use in terms of frequency, selectional
restrictions, register, etc. For example, in Italian memorabile for ‘memorable’
tends to collocate with nouns referring to events, time periods or words
worth remembering, and more rarely with words related to people
(Vocabolario Treccani, online). Taken in context, based on the in-game
description of this reward trait, memorable Sims are those whose
“relationships decay more slowly”. This unusual association has a humorous
effect which is perfectly in line with the game’s fun factor.
Another interesting example of cognate words used to name personality
traits is ‘companion’, arewardtraitfromcompletingthe Loveaspirationcategory
named ‘soulmate’. In-game, the related text string reads as “Relationships
take hard work and dedication. With a dash of both of those, and a lot of
love,
{0.SimFirstName} has achieved {M0.his}{F0.her}12 dream of becoming the
perfect spouse! Trait Earned: Companion”. According to relatable dictionary
definitions (Oxford Dictionary of English, online), a companion is a
person
(1) “with whom one spends a lot of time or with whom one travels”, (2)
“who shares the experiences of another, especially when these are unpleasant
or unwelcome”, (3) “a person’s long-term sexual partner outside marriage”.
The Italian cognate word is compagno, if male, and compagna, if female,
which presents two senses (Vocabolario Treccani, online), one of which is
equivalent to the English senses (1) and (2) above, while the second sense
explicitly refers to a partner in a romantic or sextual relationship and also,
in politics, to the way communist and socialist activists usually address each
other. This might be the reason why Italian translators felt the need to
expand the trait name into compagno di vita [lifelong companion], to make
it clear the meaning of ‘soulmate’ as one Love aspiration.

12 As discussed in Section 5.1, the text contained within braces exemplifies the game’s
vari- ables and changes depending on the player’s choices: {0.SimFirstName} stands
for and displays the name the player has selected for his/her Sim, while either ‘his’ or ‘her’
will be displayed accordingly, depending on the Sim’s gender.

4
5.2.3 Figurative and idiomatic language

This lexical group (15%) refers to the use of figurative or idiomatic

expressions and also of evocative or image-provoking words. The difficulty in
translating these traits may depend on the possibility of using equivalent
figurative expressions which already exist in the target language or to
reproduce the figurative value by using different strategies.
In Italian, equivalent idiomatic expressions which have been directly
translated are topo di biblioteca for ‘bookworm’, testa calda for ‘hot-headed’,
animale notturno for ‘night owl’ and pollice verdissimo for ‘super green thumb’.
Other figurative traits are more or less literally calqued into figuratively
equivalent expressions such as vescica d’acciaio for ‘steel bladder’, chef della
freschezza for ‘fresh chef’, tranquillità del pescatore for ‘angler’s tranquility’
or somehow paraphrased, such as mania ginnica [gym mania] for ‘gym rat’.
In terms of creativity and playfulness, another interesting example is
‘antiseptic’, which formally represents a cognate word. ‘Antiseptic’ is a
purchasable reward trait implying that “antiseptic Sims’ hygiene need decays
much slower”, according to in-game description. In English, ‘antiseptic’ is a
medicine-related term which refers to any physical and chemical substances
(1) “preventing the growth of disease-causing microorganisms” and, by
extension,
(2) “scrupulously clean or pure, especially so as to be bland or characterless”
(Oxford Dictionary of English, online). In-game, playfulness seems to depend
on the mixture of the two senses based on a hyperbole, i.e. the
uncontaminated or germ-free quality of a person. In Italian, ‘antiseptic’ is
translated into antisettico/a which, confined within the medical field and
meaning only (1), keeps the bizarre association unaltered, by figuratively using
a specialized word to describe a personality trait.

5.2.4 Informal language or slang

This working category, which represents 8% of instances, refers to the use of

informal or (US English) slang expressions whose difficulty in translation
may depend exactly on their semantic value within a language-specific
informal or slang register and, consequently, on the possibility of achieving
equivalence at both levels, in terms of meaning and register. Ideally,
translators should

4
Languaging and Translating Personality in Video Games, SQ 20

offer equivalent informal and semantic values. When it is not possible,

one of the two must be sacrificed: they may convey the same or similar
degree of informality by generalizing or specifying the meaning or they may
tone the register down and opt for a neutral but semantically equivalent
solution.
Direct translation includes, for example, amicone and amicona for
‘bro’13 and scansafatiche professionista for ‘professional slacker’. Sciatto/a
exemplifies generalization because it represents a hypernym of ‘slob’,
meaning “a person who is lazy and has low standards of cleanliness”
(Oxford Dictionary of English, online), since in Italian it usually refers to
the physical and style- related characteristics of a person and does not
necessarily convey the idea of being dirty (Vocabolario Treccani, online).
On the contrary, an example of specification is smanettone or smanettona
for ‘geek’. While the latter means “an unfashionable or socially inept
person” and, only with a modifier, “a knowledgeable and obsessive
enthusiast” (Oxford Dictionary of English, online), in Italian smanettone is an
informal word but it only refers to a computer geek, a person who is very
knowledgeable about computers and enjoys modifying hardware and
software components (Vocabolario Treccani, online). In this light, smanettone
seems to be a hyponym of ‘geek’.

5. Conclusions and further research

The study presented in this paper, though limited in scope, serves as a

starting point for future research on life simulation games, and on The Sims
franchise in particular, especially with a view to investigating the role
localization and translation play in the commercial and cultural success of
this subgenre at global level.
However, the game experience players are offered is multilayered as real
life itself, since it includes a variety of human and real world-like dimensions
and aspects whose analysis requires an interdisciplinary perspective. This
is particularly true as regards identity and the projection of personality in
simulated worlds, where psychological background is key to understanding
the

13 As regards ‘bro’, it is worth underlying that the English trait system does not present a
feminine form. Conversely, Italian translators provided a gender-variable solution, despite
the male-gendered nature of the original term (Oxford Dictionary of English, online).

4
relationship between personality simulation and its linguistic representation
in game texts. In this sense, collaboration with researchers in Personality
Psychology is desirable to explore the link, if any, between players’
personality in real life and their Sims personality.
As regards The Sims 4 personality trait system, preliminary findings have
provided an overview of the challenges translators are presented with and
the resulting skills needed to cope with them. Game localization-specific
constraints highlight the importance of specialized training, but the more
properly linguistic features of the source text confirm that high proficiency in
both the source and the target language is paramount for translation quality.
In particular, the linguistic and translational representation of gender in The
Sims 4 offers ample opportunities to comparatively examine how this game
localization-specific challenge is dealt with across different languages.
Further research is thus essential in order to provide the full picture of
the phenomenon under investigation, and include other personality-related
or, more in general, customization-related groups of terms, such as aspiration
milestones and walkstyles, and all the terminology concerning physical
appearance and clothes. Other research methodologies might be added to the
descriptive lexical approach: for example, questionnaires might be submitted
to translators and linguistic testers, and reception studies might be performed
with a sample of players.

4
Languaging and Translating Personality in Video Games, SQ 20

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Gameography

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The Sims 4, 2014, Electronic Arts.

Silvia Pettini has a Doctor Europaeus PhD in Translation Studies and is adjunct lecturer
in English Language and Translation Studies at the Department of Foreign Languages,
Literatures and Cultures of Roma Tre University. Her main research interests are
audiovisual translation, contrastive linguistics, game localization and online lexicography.

42